Svadba

ew could have foretold the staying power of the hour-long by Ana Sokolović on the day of its first reading in the Distillery District’s Earnest Balmer Studio in Toronto more than a decade ago, under the auspices of the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company. (Full disclosure: as a fledgling writer fluent in both languages, I was to be hired by company founders Dáirine Ní Mheadhra and John Hess to translate the libretto from Serbian and gibberish to English, and remember this collaboration fondly.) After it premiered, the ’s John Terauds weaving of the rituals real, reworked and imagined before a maiden’s wedding night. But the world has since decided that it an opera, and one of the most frequently performed chamber operas to come out of North America at that. Perm, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Aix-en-Provence, Belgrade, Toronto, and now Boston have all programmed it as an opera. A lot has changed since that first read-through in the Distillery. Queen of Puddings is no more, its music directors now living in Ireland. Arts organizations are leaving the Distillery District and the Ernest Balmer Studio is not likely to survive the turnover in rental demographic. The , like most Canadian papers, not publish music criticism any longer. But nonetheless persists.